4500 to 4000 BCE · Africanspan
Sirius and Orion were being watched at Nabta before any pharaoh
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The five megalithic alignments at Nabta Playa point at specific things. One is set on the position where Sirius rises just ahead of the sun. A second is set on the belt of Orion. The remaining three appear to mark the rising point of Arcturus as it shifted across the middle fifth, the late fifth and the early fourth millennia BCE, which is a record of the slow wobble of the earth kept in stone by people watching one star over centuries. The first two choices are the striking ones. In pharaonic Egypt the appearance of Sirius before dawn was the event that set the year and announced the coming Nile flood. Orion's belt became the celestial address of Osiris, god of death and resurrection and of the return of the flood. Both anchors of Egyptian sky religion were already fixed in a desert monument southwest of Aswan while Upper Egypt had built nothing monumental at all.
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